


Just this Once

by sleeplittlechild



Category: Sagas of Sundry: Dread (Web Series), Sagas of Sundry: Madness (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 04:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15065162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleeplittlechild/pseuds/sleeplittlechild
Summary: What (How) Selina survived after escaping the desert dimension.





	Just this Once

Her throat throbs in pain from how much she screams. She tears at the walls, beats against the front door that she  _ knows _ leads out into the streets of LA - not into the deserts of another dimension where her friends are trapped.  ~~ Forever ~~

Everything inside of her hurts and pulses and the only reason she stops crying is because it’s been so long since she’s had something to drink. She has no more tears to cry. She barely has enough energy to drag herself back to the lobby.

She sleeps there, on the floor of the lobby. Nobody is going to walk in and think something’s wrong with her. Nobody else is in the apartment building.

She’s alone.

 

* * *

When she wakes, she’s not sure what time it is. She’s not sure how much time has passed since she went up to the roof and met Fenly. It feels like years...decades, with all the absolute shit that she’s been put through. But the sun is shining outside and birds whistling and people running around getting to where they need to go.

The lights are on. When she places her hands against the walls, there’s a small vibration that now, seems so very noticeable. How could she have ever missed it? Had she missed it? Or had she always just stuffed it into the back of her mind, hiding it away with all the other pieces of data and information she never wanted to acknowledge?  _ Had she? Had she? Had she? Hadshehadshehadshehadshe  _ \- or maybe, now that she knew what was in the walls, she could feel it. Maybe she was making up the humming for her own benefit - making up something so she could  _ know _ it was real. Was it real? Was any of it real? Was it?  _ Was it? Was it? wasitwasitwasit - _

 

* * *

The first thing she does is go to her room and grab her computer. The power had gone out, so the job had probably only gotten a quarter of the way through. It’ll be enough to get her to the next job, she guesses.

Imagine her surprise when the computer was still up and running. The job completed. Her bank account filled. Thousands upon thousands of dollars, filed away to an account that only she can access through her hundreds of IP bounces and jumps. She’s set.

<<Keep it running. Keep the machine on.>>

And she’s got a job to do.

* * *

She spends so much time in the architect’s room. She pours over every scroll, every rolled-up map until she has them all memorized. Until she can close her eye and sort through them with just a thought. She dives into his notes, and the notes of the Cult, and buys a brand new notebook to line them all up. It’s nostalgic, like back in high school when she would write code by hand instead of paying attention in English class.

She’ll keep the machine on. She’ll find ways to make sure it can never go off. She’ll make something worthy of her friends’ sacrifice.

When she goes to sleep at night, she holds Emmett’s jean jacket close to her chest. She only cries sometimes.

* * *

 

Her boyfriend breaks up with her before she does with him. Which...is wonderful, actually. Because she had forgotten to do it in the first place. She hadn’t really picked up her computer, couldn’t bear to dive back into the real-not-real of a life behind the screen, since coming back, except when she needed to research something. (She wasn’t ready to step outside yet. She worried the apartment building wouldn’t be here when she came back.)

_ You’ve been distant. We hardly ever talk. _

_ Has something come up? Is there someone else? _

_ I’m sorry we never got to meet. _

_ I’m sorry we never will. _

She knows that she’s supposed to be sad. Her heart’s supposed to feel like it’s breaking. She’s supposed to feel  _ alone _ .

But she’s felt alone for a while now. And her brain needs to be focused on things other than her own sorrow. So she apologizes right back, saying she’s been busy and a lot of stuff has been going on, but she can’t really talk about it - which is all true.  ~~ She doesn’t want him thinking she’s more crazy than she already is. ~~

It’s only after she closes the chat box that she realizes her mantra isn’t going to work anymore. She can’t confirm that he’s real anymore. That’s when the regret hits, the panic, a scream in her throat that bubbles out into a sob.

She squeezes her eyes shut, her hands ball into fists. She has bigger things to worry about.

* * *

Abigail’s real name is Kathy. But it didn’t fit her, not since her father’s murder. When the police found her, and found the gun emptied into his chest, she was catatonic. She said she couldn’t remember what happened, what prompted the attack - was she defending herself? Was this pre-meditated - and Selina believes that. The police never pinned anything on her, but they did hold her for a full 24 hours. Afterwards, she moved out to LA on a stolen plane ticket and was homeless for two weeks. Then she found the apartment and Fernando (because she finally found out The Landlord’s name was Fernando.) let her stay because she was needed. And then she found Jude. She prefers NYX make-up, and it all ranges from metallic silvers to matte blacks - colors Selina doesn’t think she could pull off. So she keeps them scattered about her desk, chaotically organized for her to see every day she gets ready.

Her birthday was just the week before everything happened. She’d just turned 23.

Jude Marley works at the Melrose - a nice looking place and good for cheap tourists. He smokes at least a pack a day, judging by the garbage in his place. He’d moved in just a year after Selina, but they’d never crossed paths; she being a night owl and him an early bird to get through the commute. He’d had a car when he first lived here, but traded it in for $1500 and stuck to the bus to get there and back. There are bills for a house in Malibu stuffed into his desk that Selina files away and a letter that she keeps at her bedside, floundering between reading it and knowing just  _ one more thing _ and Jude’s privacy.  _ It doesn’t matter. He’s dead now. Open it.  _ ~~_ Don’t open it. _ ~~ _ He’s never coming back.  _ ~~_ He could _ _.  _ _ He was never real. _ ~~

She flicks the lighter open and closed, never lighting it, but enjoying the sound that has now become familiar.

Fenly’s only 21. He’s seen so much shit and he’s only 21. He won awards in high school for his art - he could sketch, he could sculpt, he even knew how to draw on a computer, but his favorite medium was oil paints. There’s a box of tools beneath his bed and some of them are old and well-used, but there are some that are brand new, tied with a ribbon and a note that says “I’m sorry baby. Please come back to me. I’ll make it right again.” (Selina hocks those out the window the moment she sees them. She wants Fenly, not Fenly’s past.) He’s worked at the coffee shop down the street for two months and he makes a mean cup of jo - at least that’s what his progress report says. He was habitually late for a long time (Selina guesses the dumbass ex’s at fault) but avoided being fired time and time again due to his people-person attitude.

She keeps his painting in her room, sets them against the walls on top of her desk and her dresser. It brings a little bit of life into her days, when she can look at them and not feel like Fenly’s warmth is lost to the world.  ~~ Though he is. ~~

Emmett is two years younger than her - it takes her by surprise. He acted so much older than all of them, protected them with his whole heart. His plays are full of hurt and not-so-happy endings, but they feel real to her. The secret life of a cashier in a corner store - There’s an unfinished manuscript in his desk drawer and now it’s in Selina’s. “One Night, 10 Johns” it reads across the front, written carefully by hand - contrasting the hasty written notes off in the margins. The average night for a regular prostitute. She reads through it and wears away the edges. She acts out the scenes, wondering just what Emmett was going for. There are secrets in those words, ones she’ll never know. A love story, a sob story: It remains unfinished.

Selina thinks of Emmett’s arms around her, lifting her up in the air. He hugged her tightly, hugging all of her at once. She thinks about him bashing that rock against her handcuff - the one she still has in her bedside table.  ~~ It’s real. That was all real ~~ ~~.~~ She had kissed him and he had kissed back. In that moment, it had all seemed  _ possible _ .

These are facts she repeats to herself, over and over. She knows them, they were  _ real _ . She can read the reports, hold them in her hand, find a history of them that she had nothing to do with that’s set in stone. She tells herself these things, out loud and to herself, when the voices are so loud she can’t see straight, can stand straight.

She says these things, when she’s worried that she’ll forget.

* * *

Three weeks pass and two pink slips come in the mail. And Selina realizes there’s a decision she has to make.

Those bills she had stashed away - they were to pay for the house Jude’s mom was staying in.

Fenly was a barista.

Emmett’s expected back in New York is a few weeks to deliver his next play.

Unlike her, these people had connections in the world. And they were gone now. And nobody knew.

<<I didn’t tell anybody!>>

She wouldn’t do the same - she wouldn’t hurt them that way that nobody would remember them.

It takes some searching, and a lot of pacing, and a lot more time procrastinating in the basement. She’s cleared out the rats, funnelled them back out into the skeezy furniture store next door that was always trying to peep in on her at night. She’s found out ways to re-wire the power so that it’ll take newer bulbs, ones that don’t syphon as much energy away, so she can keep rerouting it back into the machine in a never-ending mobius. She’s a hacker, not a chemist, so a lot of it has been a guessing game, a trial and error and a prayer on a string and she’s stalling.

The first thing she does is shut down Emmett and Fenly’s bank accounts, just in case somebody else has access to them - she knows that Emmett’s agent had been skimming from him. She withdraws the money and wires it back into hers and then freezes it.

She sets up a recurring payment system from hers and from Jude’s account, ensuring that the house is taken care of as long as there’s money to take care of it with.

It’s an easy job, much easier than everything else she’s doing. It’s just lines and text - she knows that.

The letters are harder. She doesn’t know what to say and only then does she realize she doesn’t know the last time that she’s actually  _ spoken _ . There’s nobody else in the apartment to speak to. She’s opened her mouth, framed her lips around words, let herself ugly cry in the privacy of her bedroom, but she hasn’t  _ said anything _ . And she’s definitely never talked about what happened.

It was an accident. A freak storm, out of the blue, and the electricity went haywire. There were 4 casualties. Sudden cardiac arrest due to electric shock. There were no bodies to be sent home.

She addresses them to Jude’s mom, to Fenly’s parents, to Emmett’s agency, and one to Abigail’s old house (just on case.)

It takes her another week to mail out the letters, between the panic attacks and the crying.

* * *

Selina is rich, but the machine is expensive. Her savings, her thieving only get her so far before she has to make another decision.

This time the ad gets sent out online, as well as in the window. She emphasizes everything The Landlord told her before - No Criminal Background Check, Cheap Rent, Out of Service elevator, and no decorations on the walls.

The four kids that barrel through the office door are quite surprising. They stick together, not a foot’s space in between them. They’re not much younger than her, but consistently call her “Ms. Tsukiyama” after she introduces herself. The lone guy pulls out an envelope stuffed with cash, some crumpled, some not. “First and last month’s rent.” He says.

The apartment doesn’t run background checks. Doesn’t mean she won’t.

The guy’s name is Kayden. A punk through and through since 84. He dropped out of Orange County Art Institute after a few months. Worked at Blockbuster, night shift, before quitting and working at a record store - same shift. History of battery and assault and underage drinking, but seems to have gone clean in the last 3 years.

Selina thinks of him at the back of the group, positioning himself between three of the ladies very carefully. He reminds her of Emmett, ready to jump up and protect at a moment’s notice.

There’s a girl who dresses just like him  ~~ and Abigail ~~ . Her name is Sat. History of drug use, including a two week stay in the hospital due to an overdose in 88. She works in the same record store at Kayden, swing shift, and attends NA meetings monthly at the local VFW. From the records, she’s been clean for 4 years.

Sat stands off to the side, her head turning to look at each of of them every other minute. She seemed like she wanted to make sure they were there, really there. Selina could relate to that.

Darby Trellis - attended Victor Valley College for Geo Engineering and interned at the Bureau of Land Management until a sudden mental breakdown, supposedly. After taking a year off, she applied to Irvine Valley Community College for Earth Sciences, taking substitute and tutoring roles through a temp agency in Orange County that Selina is pretty sure doesn’t pay her what they say they do. (She can fix that.)

She’s holding the hand of the last member of their little party, fingers intertwined, and staring Selina in the eye as Selina explains that there is a black door with a bunch of locks on it and they need to just  _ ignore _ it. (She’s hanging on a thread of keeping it together. She hasn’t talked this much in two months - has it been months? - and she wants to tell them everything, but she  _ can’t _ .) Staring back, Selina wishes she had that confidence.  ~~ She wishes she was Jude ~~ .

That last girl is Raina. She attended the New York Art Academy (Selina wonders, did she ever see Emmett’s plays?) and experienced what the college reports as “an episode of post-traumatic stress disorder.” Her parents, wealthy and influential, scheduled her for therapy that Selina sees went nowhere. (She can read between the lines of psychiatric reports.) She leads art seminars at the youth center and sells commissions through her parents, but she never went back to school.

She hides behind Darby, her bag in a vice grip at her side and a camera bag behind that. When Selina looks at her and smiles, she smiles back and it’s bright, full of love. Her eyes are haunted by something Selina can’t find in her research. But she has the same look in her eyes, so she’s not going to ask.

She will ask. “Why did you come here?” Because she needs to know. Nobody’s answered the ad except for these four. “You’re an hour away from your jobs, your families - why pick this apartment building?”

They all look at each other. Something passes between them, something serious.

Kayden is the one to meet her gaze. “Just needed a change of scene, man.” He shrugs, like it’s no big deal. When it means everything.

“Trash is on Thursdays now.” And she hands them a key for a room on the second floor.

* * *

There are days when she wants to give up. Days when working on the machine, learning every bit that she has already learned is exhausting and she can’t bother to drag herself back to her room. Days when the mantras just don’t do it and she holds her head and let time slip away from her. Hours when she just plain  _ misses _ everyone. Her new tenants - because  _ she’s _ the landlord now - are foreign and new and they don’t  _ sound _ like the others. They’re loud. They’re raucous. They’re not touched by hatred.

She’s on top of the apartment, where it all started. The night is clear. The stars remind her of the black door. There are red solo cups spread around because she never thought to come up here and clean it all up until tonight, when she feels so  _ alone _ . And the ledge is so inviting.

Emmett’s hand takes hers and squeezes it tight. His big brown eyes stare back into hers and she’s crying again.

“I’m not real.” He says, because he’s not, and it’s just such an Emmett thing to do. “I’m not real, but you are. You’re real, Selina. You matter. You’ve done such a good job surviving.”

She wants to hug him, wants him to pick her up and carry her off.  _ Off the ledge, off the world, off, off, end, dead. _ But she’s not sure how much this hallucination grants her.

He presses his forehead against hers. “You’ve done so much. You can do this too.”

“I’m so tired.”

She thinks she feels his lips on her forehead and she sobs. “I know you are. It’s okay. Let’s go to bed, hmm?”

Another hand takes hers and she’s looking at Fenly, smiling just like he did that afternoon. The boys pull her to the door and down the stairs. Emmett whispers in her ear and it chases away the bad thoughts, for now. Fenly comments on how much he likes what she’s done with the hallway. (There are brighter, newer lamps on the walls and battery operated ones on the floor that kick on in total darkness. Just in case.)

Jude pulls back the covers to her bed. Abigail lays out PJs and jokes about turning Selina into a proper goth. “You’ve already got the make-up. Be a pretty badass landlord with a little black lipstick.” Selina laughs, just a little.

She lays down in bed, squeezing Emmett’s hand till her knuckles are white. “Don’t go until I’m asleep.”

“I won’t.” He says. A chair scoots up next to the bed and he intertwines their fingers together. “I’m not real, none of this is real, but I’ll stay.”

Abigail lays on her other side. “We’ll be here, in your dreams. You can go to sleep, Selina.”

Jude and Fenly sit at the foot of her bed. She looks at them and they nod. She nods back. “I miss you guys.” She falls asleep quicker than she expected.

When she wakes up the next morning, the space next to is empty (of course) and her arm hangs numb off the side of her bed. The chair remains at the desk, with no sign of moving from the day before.

It was all a hallucination, one she’s had many times before when it all got to be too much. But it was so much more comforting, so much more encouraging, knowing what it was, and not caring.

* * *

The four tenants have been living there six months when Selina walks in and hears arguing. Working in the walls, Selina’s become an expert in stepping quietly. She rounds the second floor landing and seems them in the hallway - Darby and Kayden are face to face with each other, with a small Raina floundering to be mediator.

“What do you think you’re going to do, huh? Just pluck him out of thin fucking air?!” Kayden is red in the face, all the way to his mohawk.

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know how it’s supposed to work. I just know that this place, this apartment, has a weird energy around it, okay? That’s why I wanted to come here! That’s why I wanted us to move here.” All of Darby’s confidence is gone, replaced by a floundering, manic energy Selina has never seen before.

“Oh my god.” Kayden turns around (Selina steps back into the stairwell) and presses his fingers into his eyes. “Dammit Darby - you’re supposed to be done with this! No more, remember? Not after Him!” The word has a meaning to them, a special meaning. It sends shivers up Selina’s spine.  _ Are they cultists? Do they know the Watcher? _

_...Was there a chance, after all? _

“He said it would be my heart’s desire, Kayden! You think Tanner wasn’t included in that? And now, I have the opportunity to bring him back. We can have him back!”

“Darby…” Raina speaks up and the two spin on her. She shrinks back into the walls and they shrink back from her, like they suddenly realize how tense things are. Their shoulders drop, they each breathe deep, pacing up and down the hallway in opposite directions. “It’s been 4 years. He...He’s not coming back.”

“But he  _ could _ ! Don’t you see - ”

“Darby!” Kayden shouts and the girls jump (Selina jumps, barely having enough time to cover her mouth when she yelps.) “Fucking listen to her! What do you fucking think’s gonna happen? We’re gonna hold hands and Tanner’s just gonna fucking appear and there’ll be no consequences? For God’s Sake, the last ritual shit we did ended up with us  _ losing _ him in the first place! That shit you find?  _ Doesn’t. Fucking. Work. _ It only makes things worse. So just give it up.”

Darby’s jaw clenches, and her head ticks to the side. “Just give it up? Just like that? Just like you and Sat were supposed to give up all the drugs?”

“What the shit are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the pot, Kayden!” She shouts and from her jacket pocket, pulls out a bag of marijuana. “You told us, when we came back, that you’d quit drinking and smoking and the drugs and you’d help Sat stay sober. Then we move in here and I find liquor everywhere and I think “Ok - just a little alcohol - no big deal.” And then I find this and you’re yelling at me about messing up?”

“That’s not mine.” Kayden says and Selina knows he’s right. She backtracks and backtracks and thinks of the keys she gave them. Keys that had somehow opened up to her. She’d given them the keys to Apartment 201 - an apartment that, as far as they knew, never belonged to somebody else, because all of Jude’s belongings were in Selina’s room and the Landlord’s room.

“Then who’s is it? Sat’s? Because that’s so much better.” Darby throws it at Kayden, who doesn’t try to grab it, so it just sits on the ground. Raina stares at it, biting back a small whimper. “We need him.  _ Sat _ needs him back. Raina needs him back. You need him -  _ I  _ need him.”

Kayden’s fists clench at his side. “He’s dead, Darby.” He lifts his head and stares back at her. “And that’s not ours.”

“Then who’s the fuck is it?”

“He’s right.” Selina steps from the stairwell. Her eyes are trained on Darby, she walks forward. “It’s not his.”

The three look at her and each other. There’s a new energy in the air - confusion and surprise. “Oh. Hi Ms. Tsukiyama.” Raina scratches at her neck, playing with her blonde ponytail. “Sorry about the yelling.”

Darby ignores Raina’s attempt at placating. “Then who’s is it?”

“His name’s Jude Marley. He used to live here before...he…” The words clot together in her throat. “What were you talking about? Who’s Tanner?”

Kayden looks at Raina, who looks at Darby, who looks at Selina. Raina grips her camera strap a little tighter. “A friend.” Kayden says.

“What happened to him?” In all her research, she hadn’t found a Tanner.

Again they exchange looks. There are slight shakings of heads and widening of eyes before Darby says, “He died.” Kayden groans, putting his head in his hands and pacing away.

“And you’re talking about bringing him back?”

“We’re not crazy.” Darby instantly responds, with a bit of bite in her words.

Selina shakes her head. “No, no - I would never call you that. Trust me.” She’s a foot away from the three of them now and they stand tall above her. “I would never call you crazy.”

“So...what?” Kayden laughs and it’s deprecating. “You’re saying you believe we can just…fucking raise someone from the fucking dead?” Darby turns to glare at him, and Kayden has a madman’s look on his face.

“No, I don’t.” Kayden gestures to her, as if she just proved his point. She’s nervous, so she fiddles with her bracelets. “But if you think about it, there’s reasonable evidence that the afterlife is just another plane of existence, so if you were able to open a dimensional rift between the planes and grab your friend from that one and bring him back to this one, isn’t that achieving the same end result as raising someone from the dead?”

They’re looking at her now.

“What are you saying?” Raina asks.

Selina looks between them. Her nails are on her skin now and she knows she’s a hair’s breadth from digging them in and scratching back blood.  ~~ Not-Real-Emmett would usually hold her hand right about now, usually, but it’s a bad time for a hallucination ~~ ~~.~~ “Can you do it more than once?”

Darby is thrown for a loop. Kayden has nothing to say, no snarking comment or derivative reasoning. “I mean...I think I can. It consumes the materials, but if we have back-ups, then - ”

“Darby…” Kayden places his hand on her shoulder and Darby stops. “What are you thinking?” He asks Selina.

“Do you want to do a test-run first, before you bring back your friend?”

“How?”

Selina clenches her fists. “I have something to show you.”

* * *

They’re going to have to turn the machine off.

Selina brings them into Emmett’s room, into the architect’s room through the bathroom. Sat’s joined them, because Raina - in a rare show of determination - declares that they need to be together before they decide anything. Her eyes are doing that monitoring thing again, not letting anyone out of her sight for a long time.

“What the fuck is this?” Kayden asks, eyes gazing over everything.

“This is the only thing keeping our plane from being taken over by...an asshole.” Selina rounds the table, stands by the body of Malik. Kayden rounds the room, looking at everything and taking it all in. Sat is the one to rifle through, pulling blueprints open and sorting through notes. (Some that are Selina’s.)

Raina crosses the room and puts a hand on her shoulder. “What happened?”

Selina turns her head to look in her eyes. For the first time, in 8 months,  _ everything _ gushes forth.

Darby realizes that the machine is acting as a cage around this other dimension, cutting it off from bleeding it into other planes, including this one. Turning the machine off would give her an opening to contact her friends, and bring them home.

“It’ll also give your...whatever-the-fuck a chance to come here. And fuck all our shit.” Kayden snaps.

“If we’re dead, there’s nothing to bring back Tanner to.”

“Sat…” Kayden turns to Sat, exhausted and pitiful in the same breath.

Selina’s hand reaches out without her even having to think. Leaning against the table is her trusty sledgehammer. In one swing that scares Raina, she meets Kayden’s eyes. “I beat him off before and I had half of my mind with me at the time. I’m not going to let him take away my one chance to bring them back.”

Kayden holds her gaze for a few moments - Selina doesn’t know how long.

“If we’re doing this...we’re doing this right.”

They get walkie-talkies. Sat and Kayden stay in the architect’s room, flanking the power switch. On Raina’s signal, they’re going to flip the switch off. They have 5 minutes for something to happen before they decided that they need to turn the machine back on, lest it stay off forever.

Raina, Darby, and Selina set up in Fernando’s apartment. Selina thought it was appropriate - it was where the door first opened. She hasn’t cleaned up this room as much, because there was nothing in here of her friends - only of their pasts that they’d tried so desperately to run from. They create a pentagram below the pictures on the wall, huddled around at each point staring at the door. The smell of sandalwood and dandelions fills the air, smoke curling up to the ceiling.

Darby nods to Raina and Raina nods back. She lifts the walkie-talkie to her lips and says “Ready.”

The lights flicker, the hum that Selina’s become so attuned to goes away. Her stomach roils with nausea and she buries her nails in her pants. Then Darby starts chanting, praying, speaking at the speed of a A class student. The candle flames swell, the flames curl into shapes that Selina can’t recognize  _ because she can’t see? Because she isn’t listening - she isn’t paying attention. Sheisn’tsheisn’tsheisntsheisnt  _ Selina squeezes her eyes shut and forces herself to focus on Darby’s voice, the rhythm of her voice.

“Ok.” Darby swallows over a lump in her throat. “Now you have to speak their names, so they can find their way back.”

Her fingers ghost over the skin of her arm. It had been an impulse, one day to get something to eat because she knew that she was supposed to be eating. And sleeping (Those things had been slipping away from her. It was harder and harder to understand when she was hungry, when she was sleeping. She knows she’s supposed to, but time is slipping away from her. And she knows that’s not a good thing, so she tries to make a routine so she doesn’t slip further away.) The tattoo parlour had been right there next to the corner store.

Their names cover both of her arms. Emmett and Jude are on her forearms, Fenly and Abigail on her shoulders. And they scarred, because taking care of them fell away from her, too. But that’s good, because it’s more evidence that they were real - that all of that actually happened.

The scars tingle under her touch with each name. “Abigail. Jude. Emmett.” Fenly’s tattoo pulses in her heart, but she doesn’t know if she can save him now.

_ Next time. _

She stops talking.

The light under the door to the hallway brightens.

Nothing happens.

Raina has a stopwatch in her hands. It’s been steadily clicking away. They have 3 and a half minutes for her friends to walk through that door. Selina opens her eyes and stares it down. Watches the second hand click around and and around and around.

Nothing happens.

Three minutes.

Nothing happens.

Two minutes, fifteen seconds.

“Ms. Tsukiyama...I don’t think it worked.” Raina whispers.

“Just wait.” Selina doesn’t take her eyes off it. Seconds, seconds are passing by and nothing is happening. But this is real - everything she’s trying to do is real.

Nothing happens.

One minute, forty-five seconds.

“Nothing’s happening - we’re gonna turn on the machine.”

“No!” Selina grabs at the walkie-talkie and in a spurt of violence Abigail would be proud of, rips it out of Raina’s hands and clicks it on. “Wait - you have to wait! They need to find their way here!”

“Every fucking extra minute this thing stays open, you’re risking the entire fucking planet - are you really going to do this for something that’s not going to fucking work?”

“It’s going to work!” Selina screams into the radio. “Just wait!’

One minute.

“We’re turning it on.”

“Wait!”

The door opens.

The pink-purple sky is blinding - the white sand more so. It’s all just as she remembers it. But it’s blocked by a 5’10” man in ripped jeans and a tattered, dirty brown shirt holding a crowbar. His skin is darker than she remembers - probably from days upon months of walking a vast, empty desert. His mousy hair is wind-swept and there is confusion, surprise, and shock all at once.

Selina drops the walkie-talkie. (Raina picks it up and tells Kayden and Sat what’s going on.) She rises to her feet, never looking away from him in case he vanishes in a puff of smoke  _ It’s not real, it can’t be real. This is too good, too perfect, it can’t be can’tbe cantbecantbecantbe  _ He’s looking at her the same way, chest heaving like he’s  _ finally _ been able to breathe.

“You guys see this too, right?” She doesn’t know if she whispers or if she shouts. Blood is pumping in her ears and her fingers are numb.

“A giant guy holding a crowbar just appearing in the doorway?” Darby asks. They can even hear her gulp. “Yeah - yeah I see him.”

Darby sees him.

She sees  _ Emmett _ .

_ He’s real _ .

“Selina.”

His lips saying her name is a choir of angels descending from on high. She’s walking towards him - her legs are shaking; she doesn’t even know how she’s standing on them - and he’s reaching out towards her. She reaches back and her fingers tremble - his do too.

They touch. It’s fireworks and a rush of hot water and wonderful and terrible and they’re laughing, or sobbing, or somewhere in between but who cares?! Selina falls into his chest and Emmett drops the crowbar and he’s hugging her the way he does best - he’s hugging all of her at once. He doesn’t pick her up, but she’s standing on her toes to reach around his neck and that’s just as good.

“How - How did you find us? How did you do it?” He pulls back and he’s cradling her face in his hands. His forehead is against hers and the world is quiet and racing and all at once and none of it and she cradles his cheeks between her gloves.

She tries to speak a few times, but the tears clog her throat and she has to start over. He shushes her, tells her it’s okay, and wipes away the tears as they fall. “I turned off the machine.” He pulls back at that and she tenses her arms, holds him in place  ( ~~doesn’t let him fall away like the hallucinations did before~~.) “It’s okay! It’s okay. We’re gonna turn it back on. I’ve been working on it - I know how it works We’re gonna turn it back on and you’ll be back and it’ll be okay. We just…”

“Jude.” Her rambling cuts shorts and she’s looking into Emmett’s eyes instead of him looking into hers. Her fingers push into his skull and if it hurts, he doesn’t say anything. “Jude, and Abigail - where are they? Why didn’t they come through with you? Are they okay? Where are they?”

“They’re okay - they’re okay.” He interrupts her, pulls her in close so the world doesn’t seem so big for a second. “I told them I would go in first. But they’re just outside.” He makes it sound like they’re just in another room - not in another dimension.

Selina feels his arms go lax and everything inside of her is screaming to  _ hold on _ . She fights against it and lets him step back, step out of her arms, back to the door. His fingers trail down her arm and he looks in her eyes for as long as he can. “You did it - you brought us back. You did it.” He whispers and it’s comforting. She did it - she brought her friends home. Emmett will give the all clear and they’ll walk through the door and it’ll all be okay. She won’t be alone anymore.

She nods with every word.

Emmett picks his crowbar back up and walks to the door. He sticks his head out, the rest of his body in the small room of the old Landlord. “Guys - it’s good! Selina did it! We can go home!” He yells and it’s the happiest Selina’s ever heard him.

She thinks she can hear Jude and Abigail let out a big  _ whoop! _

“They’re coming.” Emmett yells back and he’s looking at her. The smile on his face stretches from ear to ear. It makes his eyes so small, but filled with so much joy. Selina laughs a watery laugh. She brings a hand to her mouth in case she starts to cry again. It’s a new experience - crying because of happiness. She likes it.

“Oh shit.”

Emmett’s smile vanishes. He pulls back from the door and now both hands are on the crowbar. Behind her, Darby and Raina are standing up and Selina can feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. “What is it?”

“Those fucking cultists - they’ve been following us. They’re getting closer.”

The. Fucking. Cultists.

Her fingers itch - a familiar itch. Once upon a time, it’d be the urge for another big job or a line of code that just needed to bleed out her touch. She crosses the room and swings the sledgehammer on her shoulder in one arc. She gives a passing glance to Raina and the walkie-talkie, “Tell them to wait for my signal and then turn the machine on,” and goes to stand beside Emmett. He glances over her and she smirks. He smirks back. They’re ready for this.

She can see them. Jude’s down to whatever undershirt he had beneath the button-up. Abigail’s in a tank top, her skin a bright red and the raggedy sweater wrapped around her waist. They’re running, sprinting across the sands and Jude’s holding onto Abigail’s hand. She hates running, but she has no choice.

And there are four cloaked figures behind them.

They’re already dead, in Selina’s mind.

They’re getting closer.

Five feet away, Emmett drops the crowbar. In a move that’s probably become second-nature to the three of them, he grabs their conjoined hands and pulled them inside. They collapse on the floor due to momentum and Selina reaches over them and slams the door shut. The cultists are  _ right _ there and she likes to think she slams the door  _ in their fucking faces _ . “NOW!”

“Now, Kayden!” Raina screams into the walkie-talkie. Selina holds herself against the door. She can feel the cultists pushing against it, feels them invading the world ~~her mind~~ _it won’t work she was selfish she’s doomed them all she’s only gotten them back to die beside them it won’t turn on she’s doomed them all stupid obsessed worthless pitiful crazycrazycrazycrazy_ She screams and slams her fist against the door.

The hum is back.

The machine, has turned back on.

There is no force on the other side of the door. Opening it up, it’s the hallway again.

“Did that do anything?” Sat’s voice rings out from the walkie-talkie.

It did.

It saved the world.

It saved them.

“I did it.” Selina’s voice is so small.

A hand wraps around her wrist and it yanks her down. The fall is hard on her knees, but then Jude is wrapped around her. His laugh, those small chuckles and the smell of cigarette smoke that never goes away is in her nose and he’s there. “You did it.”

She wraps her arms around him and he’s  _ real _ .

She’s pulled away violently and Abigail is hugging her, squeezing her tight. It hurts. But Selina is squeezing back and Abigail is sun-burnt and it probably hurts just as much. They pull back and gloved hands are caressing and tracing and touching every part of their faces they can reach. Abigail’s makeup is ruined, caked on and wiped off in spots. Her hair reaches past her shoulders, with bright ginger roots shining from the roots. Selina laughs and passes her hand through. “Your hair changed.”

Abigail rolls her eyes and laughs, too. “Yours did too.” Her voice is scratchy, but it’s still the same hint of sarcasm that gave Selina confidence through the months. Selina knows she’s right - her undercut has grown out and there’s strands of gray peppered throughout. If they looked closer, Selina knows they’d find a solid strip of it at the nape of her neck. But they’re not looking closer - they’re holding her close and she’s holding them and she can feel each of them under her fingers.

She didn’t know she could be this happy: She didn’t even know this much happiness existed.

Selina turns around slowly and Emmett is there - waiting. His arms open and she collapses against him for the second - the second! - time that day. He breathes heavily in her ear. She’s crying. He’s crying. He lifts her just a little and it makes everything solid, just that one moment. “You’re real.” She whispers.

“You’re real.” He sounds just as astonished as she feels. She squeezes him and he squeezes back.

“You’re real.”

“I’m real.” He whispers in her ear. It’s been months where that voice had only said  _ I’m not _ .

She’s crying again. “You’re real. This is real. _I’m_ _real_.”

She feels Emmett shaking his head. “No.” Her heart plummets, ice cold in her stomach. He pulls back. She can’t take it if this is a hallucination. This can’t be a dream - this  _ can’t _ . It will break her. She feels his hands on her face, blistering warm from being in another dimension’s desert. She grips his fingers hard. She doesn’t look away from his brown, brown eyes. “You’re real amazing.”

And Emmett’s kissing her.

* * *

It takes a while to get the ingredients to try the ritual again. Her tenants say they’ll find them on their own. That she’s gone through a lot and they know how that feels. That she needs to take the time to enjoy what she has.

So she does.

The first thing her friends do is take baths. Selina sits with Abigail and helps her peal out of her clothes. Her skin is covered in old and new sunburns. Selina’s already thinking of doctors they can go to that won’t ask a lot of questions. In the meantime, Selina tempers the water to be cold, but not too cold, and helps Abigail in.

“Oh god - it hurts. Oh it hurts but it feels  _ awesome _ !” Abigail sounds blissed out and it makes Selina smile. She hugs her head from behind and Abigail leans into it.

The kids moved into Jude’s room, which is fine, because it turns out Jude and Abigail got close ( _ closer _ ) in the desert and Jude moves into Abigail’s room. Selina returns the letter that she never read. Jude hugs her close and tells her it’s a letter he wrote to Jordan after his death. She tells him Jordan wouldn’t blame him and if he does, what he’s been through more than makes up for it. He just keeps hugging her.

They don’t talk about what happened in the desert and Selina doesn’t ask. Emmett holds her at night and when she feels him wake up in the middle of the night, she doesn’t mention it. She just turns in his arms and kisses his neck, pretending to be asleep. Usually she hears him chuckle and he kisses her forehead. Sometimes he’s quiet. His arms trail up and down her tattoos and she really does fall back to sleep.

He’s always there when she wakes up.

* * *

They drive out to Orange County on a Wednesday a months later. Jude’s gotten his job back at lower pay and it was the soonest day he could get off. They all pile into Raina’s tiny car. With the eight of them Sat’s sitting in Kayden’s lap, Abigail in Jude’s, and Selina sits on Emmett in middle (Darby gets the passenger seat all to herself because “because.” Kayden rolls his eyes and Sat pinches him before he can say anything.) How they’ll fit another person in here is anybody’s guess.

“We’ll make it work.” Raina says, because she doesn’t see any other outcome to this.

Selina squeezes Emmett’s arms around her. She doesn’t either.

They pull up to the forest preserve and park the car. Sat said they had a long hike, so they start unpacking there instead of scouting ahead first. (Although there seems to be no reason. The four of them seem to know this area pretty well.) Darby and Raina pull out small stones to form the pentagram and candles and incense of sandalwood and dandelions. Abigail grabs a pistol. Jude pulls out the monster tooth. Emmett grabs the crowbar and Selina grabs the sledgehammer.

They hike out through the woods. They come to a fence and the four don’t even hesitate - they push against one section and it just falls down. Selina shares a knowing look with Abigail, a small smile, and they press on, up to the top of the mountain in the distance. It’s flat, just big enough for their ritual. They leave the four strangers to whatever moment they seem to need as they approach and take position.

The plan is for Darby to perform the ritual surrounded by her friends. It’s different this time. They’re literally  _ raising someone from the dead _ . There’s no door to open up - no place to walk out of. There’s only a call they’re sending out in  _ hopes _ that their friend will answer. Selina and her friends flank them at all points for whatever else wants to answer.

Emmett kisses her as Darby lights the candles. “You got this.” He whispers. Selina grips the sledgehammer tighter and nods. She won’t let him down. He pulls away slowly, holding on till the last moment, and takes his spot across from her behind Darby.

The moon is high in the sky, clear sky and stars shining down. The incense rides the gentle wind and surrounds them all, making symbols that are almost familiar to Selina - there in the back of her mind. Kayden looks to Sat, who looks at Darby. Raina’s hands are held tight in Kayden’s hands - if her nails are pinching his skin, he doesn’t show it. She looks every which way, like she knows  _ something _ is going to come out from the shadows.

Darby’s recitation quiets. The wind is deafening in those moments. “We have to call out to him. We need to summon him here - to return here.”

Kayden sighs. He turns away. Selina knows that he’s been the most doubtful of this ritual, the most scrupulous. He’s been beside Darby in every step of research, double checking and triple checking. Selina’s seen him hovering between Raina and Sat and making sure they were alright, that they’d be alright if their friend didn’t return. She thought he almost seemed like a shield, protecting their fragile hearts from inevitable disappointment.

Selina’d tried to confront him on his actions a few times, but he brushed it off without hesitation. Selina wondered who protected his heart?

He doesn’t let go of Raina’s hand.

Sat speaks. “The first picture you ever took...was with your mom’s camera.” Her tone is measured and controlled. Selina can hear the tears as they are no doubt welling up in Sat’s eyes, but they do not fall. “You told me to come over and we went in the backyard. We spent the whole day taking pictures.” She looks away from the others into her lap, twining rings around her fingers. “When I was alone, I would think about those days...as maybe the happiest memory I have.” Her voice trailed off into the wind. Abigail leans forward and with her free hand, pats Sat on the shoulder twice. Sat nods, wipes away tears that haven’t fallen, and picks her head back up.

In the center of all the candles, Raina places her camera down. “Kayden found this.” She says. Selina has never seen Raina go anywhere without the camera. She keeps it in a vice grip at her side at all times. She pats it and fingers it like a wooby. “It’s one of your old cameras. I...uh, I’ve been using it to learn photography. Like you.” Kayden squeezes her hand. Raina rakes her hair with the other one. “I, I got the film developed and I put it in this scrapbook and when I...I’m having a hard time, I look at it. Like...when I’m missing you.” She hiccups. Kayden pulls her back away from the pentagram. Raina buries her head in his shoulder. Kayden doesn’t hold her, he doesn’t shush her or tell her that it’s okay. He lets her cry.

Darby’s hands clench and unclench in the fabric of her pants. She worries her lips between her teeth. Moments, minutes pass before she says anything. “I know you talked to my parents...after I went…” She makes the swirly-q gesture of ‘crazy’ and laughs. Selina doesn’t know if it’s forced or not. “You tried to explain what happened without….explaining what happened.” Selina’s watching Darby, so she notices when Darby’s eyes glaze over. She knows when Darby’s seeing something else, stuck in a memory. (She knows that feeling too well.) “That’s what you were doing here, too. You were checking up on me, making sure I was ok. When I felt like the whole world was against me, you were there. You were always protecting us, even when we didn’t know it. Even Kayden…you wouldn’t let leave until you got Kayden out of that mine…” She laughed again, a watery sound. “You wouldn’t leave us...so we won’t leave you.”

The words are spoken with finality, and it seems to work. Shadows creep out from the forest yards away and grow closer. Selina and the others spin on a dime. They raise their weapons in defense. Selina feels her shoulders tense and her legs hurt from standing however long she has, but she’s itching for a fight, too. The shadows rise into smoke that eclipses the moon above them. Selina thinks she hears a low growl inside of it.

“Is it...is it working?” Raina asks.

Selina doesn’t think so. The shadows feel angry, feel heavy - like they’re bogged down...no... _ made up _ of hatred. The hatred that ruins everything it touches. And wants others to hate, too. That doesn’t sound like their friend, their  _ Tanner _ .

It crawls across the ground. It tumbles over their shoulders and onto the pentagram. “Oh shit!” Jude yells and Selina spins back around. One of the candles is covered by the smoke and it’s waning. Jude has his zippo out, trying to light it again. “It’s trying to snuff out the lights.” One next to it goes out and Kayden is there the next second, pulling out a lighter and lighting the wick.

“What’s going on?” Raina’s voice is filled with tears and emotion: Worry for her friends, panic for what’s happening, and fear for her lost friend.

“Is this Tanner?” Sat asks. She jumps up and sits back down on the other side of Raina and gathers her in her arms.

“No...no, it shouldn’t be. He should be whole - he should be here! I...I don’t know, he...I don’t know!” Darby is screaming into the shadows, rocking and burying her hands in her short hair.

The shadows are thicker now. Selina can’t see the woods beyond them. But she can’t see something she can  _ hit _ either, and that’s just as frustrating.

The growling...turns into laughter.

“What didn’t you do?” Abigail yells, because the smoke and shadow is whipping around them. Hair is flying everywhere and it’s almost getting hard to see  _ each other _ . Selina feels the urge, the  _ need _ to reach out to Emmett, to know that he’s  _ there _ ( _ not being taken away, never taken away, gone forever, never appearing never existed never there nevernevernevernever _ ) But he’s behind Darby and she’s behind Kayden and the shadows are getting stronger.

“I don’t know! I followed the ritual! We were supposed to call out to him and we did!  _ He should be here! _ ”

“Well if this is your friend, he’s being an asshole!”

Call out to him.

Selina’s tattoos tingled against her skin.

“His name.” She realizes, and then she says it again, louder. “His name! You have to call out his name! You have to say his name!” She screams as loud as she can.

The shadow fills her lungs. It’s hard to breathe. She drops her sledgehammer to clutch at her throat. The smoke claws at her throat and no matter how much she coughs, it won’t come loose. The shadows are darker now, or is that her vision? The ground is suddenly closer as she falls to her knees.

“Selina!” Emmett yells above the unsettling volume of the wind.

She’s coughing and hacking and sucking in air that doesn’t exist. Just more smoke. She hack and hacks and with each one it’s hard to do another one. Selina feels light-headed.

Behind her, she  _ faintly _ hears Kayden stand up. “Tanner!” He yells, the loudest of them all. “I’m sorry - okay?! I’m sorry for everything that happened! I’m sorry for riling you up, for all the stupid fucking arguments, okay? I’m sorry for disappearing that year. I’m sorry for drugs and the drinking and every stupid fucking decision I made that hurt you. I’m sorry, Tanner, I’m sorry. But if this is you, then you need to  _ fucking. try. harder.  _ You don’t do anything without a fight, so don’t give up now.” The cacophony of shrieking wind and smoke died down, whirling around them at less of a deafening roar. “Sat needs you. Raina needs you. Darby needs you - fuck it,  _ I need you back _ . We’ve been getting along, Tanner, for 5 years, but it’s 5 years of time we borrowed from  _ you _ . You need to get your ass back here and make sure we actually did something  _ worth. your. life.  _ Come back, Tanner.”

The smoke and shadows fade away.

_ “Please come back _ .” Kayden whispers. Selina thinks she may be the only one who heard it.

Smoke pours out of her mouth like vomit. She gasps in cold night air. She digs her fingers deep into the Earth just to stay upright. Somebody’s arms are around her shoulder, pulling her deep into a chest that she can’t see through tears welling in her eyes. Lips press against her forehead - Emmett. His other hands rubs her back, soothing the burn till she can breathe again.

“What was that?” Sat asks.

“Did...did we do it?” Raina asks, softer.

“I...I...I don’t know.” Darby’s hands pull from her hair.

Kayden’s fists are clenched tight at his side. He doesn’t say anything.

Selina tells them they need to wait. Tanner needs to find them, just like her friends needed to find the door to the apartment. They just need to wait.

Night on the mesa is cold. They agree to stay up and watch in shifts - Jude and Abigail first, then Sat and Kayden, then Emmett and Selina. Darby tries hard to sleep at all and Raina tosses and turns. Before dawn hits, they’re all asleep. Abigail is cocooned in another oversized sweater, curled against Jude. Kayden and Sat are hunched over each other, sitting up and arms around each other. Emmett has his jean jacket back and he’s wrapped his arms around Selina’s small frame. She nestles in against him and falls asleep to his whisperings.

Sunlight just breaks over the mountain when a sound echoes from the forest. Sat and Kayden jolt awake and Selina awakes at their murmuring. (She was always good at eavesdropping. Good skill to have, when you were gathering data.) In her sleepiness,  _ something _ is walking out of the forest. Selina shakes Emmett awake, who does so in a second with eyes of alert for panic and wrong. Her hands on his face, she shushes him before he can think anything is wrong. The four of them look to the treeline.

He’s lanky, is the first thing Selina thinks. Tall and long and  _ pale _ . Is that a result of the resurrection (because they totally just resurrected a person...uhm...she’ll deal with that later.) or is that just  _ him _ ? His orange hair flies in every direction. He’s visibly shaking and shivering (which makes sense. It’s very cold up in the mountain and he’s  _ naked _ .)

“Are you guys seeing this?” Selina doesn’t know who asks that. She just nods.

“Is that your friend?” Emmett asks.

And it’s like a dam breaks. Kayden jets from his seat, his army jacket off before he’s even five steps away. He comes up to the body...to Tanner...and wraps it around him. It comes to just over his hips. The semblance of dignity.

Tanner jerks away in instinct. He’s a wild animal, prone to spooking and running at the first sign of danger. Kayden holds him close by the lapels and stares into his eyes. “Hey...hey, it’s me. You know who I am, don’t you? You know.”

Tanner just blinks. His eyes dart between Kayden and Sat, once in a while at Selina and Emmett. But he says nothing.

Slowly, obviously, Kayden lifts one hand from the jacket and places it on Tanner’s face. Tanner jumps, just a little. His gaze is fixed on Kayden when he speaks. “Do you know who you are?”

Tanner’s fingers, one at a time, let go of his arms in jerky motions. They finger the zipper of Kayden’s jacket. His eyes look at it and his brow furrows. He looks back up at Kayden. “...H...h...how?”

Kayden’s lips split into the biggest smile Selina’s ever seen of him. His other hand comes up and he’s  _ cradling _ Tanner’s face between them. “Darby found some shit. We did a test run and then we came here. You idiot, we spent the whole night here waiting for you. What took you so long?”

“Kayden…” Tanner’s mouth moves like it doesn’t know how to form words. Selina doesn’t doubt that that might actually be the case.  ~~ What use does a corpse have for speech? ~~

Sat steps forward, a mid-way point between Selina and Emmet and Kayden and Tanner. “Guys?”

The two look over to her. Tanner’s eyes widen and squint over and over. “...Sat?” Sat runs over to him and grabs him in the biggest hug to ever exist. It looks painful, but that’s regardless. It sounds like Tanner is saying something, speaking more as  _ life _ comes back to him, but Selina can’t hear any of it.

Emmett holds her close and kisses her ear. She intertwines their fingers over her stomach.

Kayden volunteers to drive back. Raina sits on Darby’s lap in the backseat. And in the front, bundled in an emergency blanket Raina had in her trunk, Tanner sleeps in Sat’s arms.

* * *

The following weeks are...eventfully uneventful. Everyone goes back to their jobs (Abigail got a job with Kayden and Sat at the record store, morning shift because she’s apparently a morning person - who knew? Emmett calls up his agency with the news that he has another play coming...this one with a happy ending, for once.) Selina moves her hacking and researching into the lobby to sit with Tanner, when he wants to come out of the his room.

Tanner doesn’t talk much, in general. Selina doesn’t know if it’s the same thing that kept him quiet on the mountain or if that’s how he was to begin with. But he’s very tactile; he walks around a lot and just touches things. (Making sure they’re real, and that he’s real enough to know that.)

Kayden and Sat are never too far away from him. Sat is tactile, too, always ready with a hug or a kiss. Looks pass between Kayden and Tanner and they usually end with a chuckle and somebody flipping the bird. Raina tells Selina that it’s not what it used to be, not how they used to act, but she’s not complaining.

Tanner tells her that he likes her photos. Raina preens and smiles wide and says “We should go on a nature walk somebody and take pictures!”

Tanner’s smile wanes a little, a little bittersweet. “We should.” He says, softly. “Maybe. When I’m better.”

_ When he’s better _ .

Things take time. But Selina has learned that time is ok.

* * *

The door.

The Black Door.

The Black Door that everybody’s supposed to ignore, but nobody can, because it’s a black hole of nothingness that radiates cold even in California heatwaves and sucked up Selina’s friend before he could even be her friend.

Jude usually finds her, just staring at it when he comes home from work. Her fingers twitch and she doesn’t realize it. The need to undo all the locks, break through any fireweall, anywhere she can’t go, and dive in to get what she wants. It’s what she’s always done, it’s the reason she became a hacker.

He takes her by the hand back to the lobby. Abigail usually comes out and they talk about things that don’t really matter. The black door is never addressed, but just there in the back of her mind.

“It’s not fair.”

She says this during dinner. Their lives are a bit more standard now that they can have dinner on a daily basis. (Abigail is the one who sets up a timetable for Selina, for all of them. The consistency helps them adapt to living again, instead of surviving.)

They look over at her. She knows she’s staring at nothing, that mac and cheese isn’t interesting enough for the intense glare she’s giving them. Emmett takes her hand, but she doesn’t look at him.

“You’re thinking about Fenly.” Abigail says. “Aren’t you?”

It’s not even a question.

“I got you back...I got you all back, from another dimension. They resurrected their friend from the dead. We all got what we wanted...except for him.”

Nobody says anything. Emmett sighs and squeezes her hand tighter.

Abigail puts her silverware down.

“What did you have in mind?”

* * *

Tanner is at the back.

He’s strong, he says. Kayden and Sat eye him worriedly, but he doesn’t look away from Selina. “I’m not letting any of you go.” Selina believes him.

Jude is at the door, with Emmett behind him. Abigail and Sat stand behind them and behind them are Selina and Darby. Kayden and Tanner are at the end, Kayden with a chain he hitched to the front door wrapped three times around his fist and Tanner holding onto the railing of the hallway.

It takes them barely a fraction of the time to undo the locks. It’s muscle memory from an experience only experienced once.

“Everybody ready?” Jude asks.

Nobody is. But they are.

He opens the door.

The blackness, the void, the absolute  _ nothing _ is just as all-consuming. Sat and Raina both scream. Tanner loses grip on the railing in a moment of blind panic. They all lurch forward one foot. Kayden yells something and picks him back up. He holds onto the railing and they’re solid once more.

“FENLY!” Jude yells into the abyss. Nothing answers back and he yells again. He can’t see worth a damn, no matter how many ‘stars’ twinkle in the distance.

“FENLY!” Abigail yells. Nothing.

Kayden’s boots lurch against the hardwood. They all fall another foot. Tanner struggles to pull them back.

_ Come home _ . Selina thinks. Hopes. Prays.

“...Guys?”

They all gasp. Emmett yells, “I see him, I see him! Hold on!” And Selina just squeezes her eyes shut. She lets every horrible thing scream inside her head. ( _ gone forever. One then five then eight then nine then none. Your fault. Don’t know enough. Not good enough. Not  _ sane _ enough. Crazycrazycrazy selfishselfishselfish not worth it no. no no no) _

And tells all of it to Fuck. The. Fuck. Off.

They are getting Fenly back.

She is getting her motherfucking happy ending.

* * *

It all ends back on the rooftop.

They decide to have a celebration, a real soir é e - the party that had been so rudely interrupted a year ago.

(Fenly tumbles out of the black door and they slam it shut, locks all in place. A clock, somewhere chimes, and Selina realizes - twelve months have gone by. Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer have all passed her by in this crazy year.)

Abigail can cook, apparently. She makes guacamole, corn dogs, and bakes cookies that Emmett steals all throughout the day (causing her to make more and ban him from her kitchen.) Selina laughs and denies that some of those he stole because she asked him to.

Raina and Fenly decorate the roof and talk art and she promises to get him a job at the youth center and to get him in contact with her contacts. His face lights up.

Sat brings games for them to play...starting with hopscotch. Kayden promptly teaches Jude how to cheat at hopscotch.

“How the hell do you cheat at hopscotch?” Sat shouts when she overhears them.

“Easy,” He says. “Like this.” With Sat attention on him, she doesn’t have time to react when he grabs the small piece of concrete she was using and drops it off the side of the building. (Into an alleyway, fortunately.) Sat screams and chases him around the roof. Kayden is laughing all the way. Tanner snaps a picture with a polaroid when they run close to him.

Kayden jumps behind Tanner’s chair, hands on his shoulders. “Tanner’s safe! You can’t hit me through Tanner!”

“That’s not fair!”

Kayden sticks his tongue out. He relaxes enough for his grip to slink down and he hugs Tanner from behind. Tanner chuckles and squeezes Kayden’s arms.

Darby comes up a partly-actually-mad Sat with another rock. She sticks her tongue back out at Kayden.

Things don’t go back to how they used to be. Selina never does find out what the story of the mountain really is. She never learns about what life was like in the desert dimension. Sometimes Fenly gets a dark look over his face and everything just goes still. Tanner will touch his arm and they share a look, an expression of knowing sorrow that can’t be explained.

Selina still loses track of time. Abigail’s joked about setting up alarm clocks, but the thing is that that wouldn’t be a bad idea. She forgets to eat, she forgets to sleep. She forgets she needs to move when she’s been hunched over too long, staring at a blank spot on her computer. She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming and lashing out and she’s hit Emmett sometimes and she hates herself for it. He cradles her head between his hands, presses their foreheads together and whispers in her ear.

“I’m real. You’re real. That all really happened. And you fixed it  _ all _ .”

Sometimes it’s all she needs to hear and she cries in his arms.

Sometimes she doesn’t believe him.

The doubting words in her head never go away.

The world was never going to be the same, not after everything they’d been through. Their eyes are open now and can never be shut again. Selina works on the machine, teaches Darby and Kayden how each piece works. They keep daily vigilance on it and now she has more people to bounce ideas off of to make sure it never goes out again. They’ve angered a lot of people - who knows who or what would seek revenge if another rift opened.

Darby brings home more and more books on the occult everyday. Emmett’s old room turns into a makeshift library. Raina looks worried, but Darby always comes to bed.

Nothing is the same. There’s no way it could be.

But just this once, the world feels OK.


End file.
